Nice essay-cum-review in the NYTimes of a bunch of books addressing the relationship between science and religion, from several different viewpoints.
http://tinyurl.com/fp5mz Excerpt: July 25, 2006 Books on Science Faith, Reason, God and Other Imponderables By CORNELIA DEAN Nowadays, when legislation supporting promising scientific research falls to religious opposition, the forces of creationism press school districts to teach doctrine on a par with evolution and even the Big Bang is denounced as out-of-compliance with Bible-based calculations for the age of the earth, scientists have to be brave to talk about religion. Not to denounce it, but to embrace it. That is what Francis S. Collins, Owen Gingerich and Joan Roughgarden have done in new books, taking up one side of the stormy argument over whether faith in God can coexist with faith in the scientific method. With no apology and hardly any arm-waving, they describe their beliefs, how they came to them and how they reconcile them with their work in science. In "The Language of God," Dr. Collins, the geneticist who led the American government's effort to decipher the human genome, describes his own journey from atheism to committed Christianity, a faith he embraced as a young physician. In "God's Universe," Dr. Gingerich, an emeritus professor of astronomy at Harvard, tells how he is "personally persuaded that a superintelligent Creator exists beyond and within the cosmos." And in "Evolution and Christian Faith," Dr. Roughgarden, the child of Episcopal missionaries and now an evolutionary biologist at Stanford, tells of her struggles to fit the individual into the evolutionary picture an effort complicated in her case by the fact that she is transgender, and therefore has views at odds with some conventional Darwinian thinking about sexual identity. If his eminence in science were not so unassailable, a fourth author, the biologist E. O. Wilson of Harvard, might also be taking a chance by arguing that religion and science ought to take up arms together to encourage respect for and protection of nature or, as he calls it in his new book, "The Creation." Although he writes that he no longer embraces the faith of his childhood he describes himself as "a secular humanist" Dr. Wilson shapes his book as a "Letter to a Southern Baptist Pastor," in hopes that if "religion and science could be united on the common ground of biological conservation, the problem would soon be solved." Coming as they do from a milieu in which religious belief of any kind is often dismissed as little more than magical thinking, this is bravery indeed. But other new books, taking a different approach, also claim the mantle of bravery.... ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Join modern day disciples reach the disfigured and poor with hope and healing http://us.click.yahoo.com/zAINmC/Vp3LAA/i1hLAA/UlWolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
